If you read any Vietnam travel book, one of the first attractions always listed is the Cu Chi Tunnels. Before I came to Vietnam, I was like “cool, tunnels! Sure, I’ll visit them since my book tells me it’s one of the top tourist attractions”! Then I learned the history of the tunnels and read about what the sites consisted of, and I can honestly say I was really flabbergasted at the idea behind it all. The Cu Chi tunnels are essentially a far stretching network of underground tunnels that were used during the Vietnam War. Moreover, many Viet Cong soldiers used the tunnels as shelter, a hiding place from American soldiers, a headquarters for communication among leaders, and a storage area for weapons and food. There was even a hospital for wounded soldiers. It’s reasonable to assume that living in those tunnels was miserable for those soldiers. It’s incredibly dark, cramped, and hard to breathe in those tunnels (I couldn’t stand it for more like 5 minutes). Not to mention the obvious lack of food and water. There were situations when soldiers had to remain in those tunnels for a long period of time, something that I can’t imagine being able to endure. Because of this, I can’t imagine visiting a place like this, knowing what there is to know, and not feel a bit sad. From my readings, the tours of the tunnels sound ridiculous. The idea that there are souvenir shops, “VC clothes”, “VC food”, and restaurants is a little weird. Stranger, there are actually recreational facilities where people have the option to practice shooting! Hello people, it’s a war site! People have died in these tunnels! According to Alneng in “What the Fuck is a Vietnam?”, 10,000 people of 16,000 Vietnamese people to be exact have died in those tunnels(473)! So that’s when I decided: hell no, I will not be one of those annoying tourists with their annoying cameras taking silly pictures of themselves crawling out of tunnels, completely ignorant of what the tunnels actually represented. I will not participate in making war a commodity!
Ok, so at least I’m an annoying tourist who is actually knowledgeable about the Cu Chi tunnels. Don’t judge yet, let me explain.
Before I visited the Cu Chi tunnels, I expected to see mainly foreigners who embraced the tourist culture of the Cu Chi tunnels. Additionally, I expected the Vietnamese youth to also be part of this group because they generally viewed the Cu Chi tunnels as a “form of entertainment that is largely detached from the war” (Schwenkel 18). So I set out to observe the behavior of foreigners and Vietnamese people at the tunnels. What I found was not completely what I expected.
Our group of 15 was the biggest group of foreigners. Because we all learned about the tunnels and read those articles about tourism and the tunnels, I observed that we were all a bit hesitant about taking pictures or seeming too enthused…in the beginning. But we passed so many middle-aged Vietnamese visitors who were all impeccably dressed running around laughing and posing with mannequins. It definitely threw me off. After seeing mostly middle-aged Vietnamese people acting like tourists, I felt like we all loosened up a bit towards the end, or at least I did. I was a little less afraid of offending anyone. So that’s my justification for the picture: it’s difficult to not act touristy when you’re in that touristy atmosphere, especially if the locals are acting touristy. It almost makes it seem okay. When I came back and asked my Vietnamese teacher why Vietnamese people walked around Cu Chi like it was Disneyland, she simply claimed that “Vietnamese people like entertainment” and that knowing the facts and history of a place is less of a concern or interest.
But I’m not going to lie, some of the stuff at the tunnels were a bit much, like the mannequins. I don’t see what purpose they serve at all. Do we need to be reminded that there were actual people that had to live like that? There was a moment when my group and I were in a classroom with mannequin students and a mannequin teacher and there were bomb noises going off in the background…and I felt sad thinking about what that really meant in the past. Another thing that made me feel slightly uncomfortable was the hired actresses that worked at some of the homes. I can’t quite explain why though: perhaps it was because they were hired to pretend to be from a period of war and suffering, perhaps it was because they all looked so unhappy, or perhaps because it felt unnatural and fake that they were hired to be leered at by tourists. All the mannequins and actresses just made everything seem more fake. Maybe the mannequins and actresses were meant to give people the full, authentic experience, but that’s not what it did for me. I could never fully understand the extent of the suffering and hardship those soldiers had to go through, and I know I wouldn’t want to either.
The last thing I noticed was how “Cu Chi” was printed on random souvenir objects that didn’t seem to pertain to the war at all. Has the name of a significant instrument in the war seriously become a consumerist attraction?
I left the tunnels with one question lingering in my thoughts: where do we draw the line between using war as a tourist phenomenon and showing respect for a nation’s history?
References:
Alneng, Victor. 2002. “What the Fuck Is a Vietnam?’ Touristic Phantasms and the Popcolonization of (the) Vietnam (war).” Critique of anthropology 22(4): 461-89.
Schwenkel, Christina. 2006. “Recombinant History: Transnational Practices of Memory and Knowledge Production in Contemporary Vietnam.” Cultural Anthropology 21(1):3-30.